X.
Marienbad at six o'clock in the morning.
The air is still fresh and fragrant, the long, slanting sunbeams fall between the damp coolness of the woody shadows. The guests crowd along the narrow spring walk, their glasses in their hands. They form a line before the spring after they have emptied their goblets, considerately turn and conscientiously take exercise.
The sand beneath their feet, moist with the night dew, is of a dark reddish color. On the leaves of the graceful trees sparkle little drops of dew like finest enamel. In the turf which borders the sand walk great drops shine like diamonds. A white mist, too transparent to be called a fog, fills the distance. Thicker and thicker the guests crowd around the spring.
Marienbad is overfull this year. Pleased landlords rub their fat hands, and push up prices to a most unheard-of amount. Guests who have omitted to engage rooms by telegraph can find no decent accommodations, seek shelter in the most miserable private houses, offer gold mines to shoemakers, tailors and glove-makers for one room. A whole excursion trainful pass the night in the waiting-room.
The daughter of some reigning family, travelling incognito under the name "Comtesse Stip," has engaged the greatest part of the largest hotel for herself and her little prince in Scottish costume. A swarm of distinguished moths from every country has followed the princely light, and a crowd of parvenus, like a swarm of insects of the night, has followed the moths, who pass their time in Marienbad bandying strangely unselfish compliments.
The famous Vienna artists play every evening in the stuffy theatre; princesses and dramatic coryphées meet each other on the spring promenade.
To-day a new animation is displayed by the spring pilgrims. All gaze at a couple who have this morning appeared for the first time upon the promenade. The aristocratic curiosity seems even more awakened than the plebeian, and all the thirty or forty pairs of eyes of Marienbad "society" are fixed upon the same spot--upon the knight of Harfink and his young wife.
"That is the Juanita, the Carini; how badly she is dressed, how fat she has grown, how homely!" goes from mouth to mouth. "And not even an artistic temperament--a woman who could be sensible enough to marry a 'checked' iron founder. When she sees Lanzberg--how he must feel!" Thus says society. Meanwhile, not noticing the voices hissing around her, Juanita, the widowed Marchesa Carini, upright and stiff, with the consequential manner of a retired dancer, walks between the knightly Harfink and his son, beaming with pride and satisfaction.
How she looked fifteen years ago, at the time when she so fatally crossed the path of life of Felix Lanzberg, it would be difficult to determine. Today she looks like all elderly Spaniards, who to our unpractised northern eyes resemble each other almost as much as elderly negresses.